This morning I discovered, whilst laying in bed listening to Rob Da Bank on Radio1, a term for a genre of music which has probably been around for ages (especially given that it seems to encapsulate Burial in some way): future garage.
It’s like, garage, man, but it’s in the future! Or, the present, as the future’s now called.
Some sounds, and then some links:
Reddit has a future garage area and soundcloud has an ace group too.
Seems Facebook have removed (or, given the distributed nature of their codebase, are in the process of removing) the “sk=top” kludge that powered my old script.
So, if that’s stopped working for you, here’s the replacement method.
It’s been replaced with a new command, so here’s a new script to default the logo and home icon to use this, so you don’t have to click the “sort by” thing and change it each time you visit. “Top Stories” (now termed “highlighted stories it seems) aren’t removed any more, but they’re at least placed chronologically by using this, which is good enough.
Should work this way for quite some time, I’d expect.
Yesterday, several zombies arose in Brighton and done a walk all the way from somewhere to somewhere else. According to an official count from the main organiser there were around 4,000 of the blighters! 3,500 started out, with around another 500 latecomers (well, they are zombies after all) joining in as they went, and I done a photo of quite a few of them.
Click any one of the 15 photos below to go to the full version on Flickr. There’s 178 photos in total in my Flickr gallery. Sounds like a lot, but most of them aren’t rubbish, so it’s worth a look. You can click this to start at the first one, and just keep clicking “next” at the top, or you could click this for a thumbnail view of the lot. Aren’t I good to you, eh?
I’d heard from people before that lenses were not always sharpest at their widest aperture settings, but never really sat down and checked it out. Reading an “e-book” about street photography just now and seeing the topic brought up again however, made me decide to check it out.
Shut up!
My 50mm f/1.8 prime seemed a perfect candidate to experiment with, so I stuck my Xbox360 pad in my light tent, both my 100W bulbs on it, and snapped four shots from my tripod, at f/1.8, f/2.8, f/4 and just for the shit of it f/8. At f/8 it was down to 1/40 shutter timing, even under dual 100W brightness, so it’s unlikely that’d ever get used, but I wanted a reasonably high end point.
Well it turns out that, yes, the thing is rather pants when at its widest. See here, a nice four way 50% crop of the thing I was focussed on (the text of the “space” bar, set manually, at 10x zoom on the LCD, to make sure it was proper tight) essentially SOOC:
Yes, yes it is. I was quite surprised by exactly how shit it was. I think the shitness is exaggerated by the extreme bright light, mind, which is why it’s never been so clear before, but it’s always looked mildly pants when wide open, and I’ve always shot with it wide open because I bought it thinking it was an f/1.8. Now I know better, I’ll stick to f/2.8, or maybe even f/4, or above. Husss.
Oh and here’s the full shot of the pad at f/4 because why not.
Thanks to my mate Rob Warwood, who gave me the idea of trying this, and thanks to my splendid coding skills, if you’re using Firefox (which, y’know, you kinda should be) you can return Facebook to its old, simple, sensible, newest-first method of sorting its news feed with this simple thing what I done wrote just now.
It works by changing the link on Facebook’s logo at the top left to point to a special URL which forces the time-based listing.
Problems? Not working? Leave me a comment.
But please, do ensure you follow the above. My script only changes the link on the logo, so you still need to click that, but it’s better than nothing, and clicking the logo was my default method of refreshing the page already so it seemed an obvious mechanism to attach to.
Sadly it’s not even mildly lewd. It’s an add-on for Firefox which allows simple scripts to run which can modify the behaviour of webpages, inside the browser. You need to be a coder to create these scripts, but it’s much less effort than writing a full blown add-on, so it makes things a lot simpler.
You could create scripts to replace any images on a page, or filter out swear words, or strip out great swathes of page content (it would be easy to create one to hide Facebook’s Ticker, for example), or change a link or two. It’s pretty fly (but not lewd ._.)!
There’s an updated script now, which also turns the “Home” link at the top right into a special newest-first link too. To upgrade your script, simply click the link from Step 3 above, install the new script, and refresh your Facebook page.
Now works properly with SSL on, or with SSL off! Automatically detects and changes the URL appropriately. As before, just click the link in Step 3 to reload the script.
Decided today that my trusty grey-and-orange blog-face needed a bit of a makeover, found this rather lovely minimal theme, and after a touch of tweaking, I’m quite liking it. Everything’s nice and clear and tidy (except for that opening sentence, but ho hum).
Unlike all the other browsers listed up there, it’s decided that complying with internet standards is too much like giving a crap, and isn’t rendering the lovely text shadows on my title and headers, which, really, makes a world of difference to how tidy it looks. Stupid blasted Internet Exploder.
Over an hour. To recreate an effect every other browser out there, including the one on my phone, can do inherently.
This is the problem with Internet Exploder. We Firefoxians and so on who despise it so, do not do so to be trendy, or alternative, or underground, or anti-establishment, but because it’s a horrendous piece of shit which forces you to spend hours making stuff look the same as it does in every other browser straight out of the box.
The cost, in time spent doing crap like this, to the web development industry, is enormous.
And even then, it’s kludgey, and slow.
I’m so enraged by this, I’ve made an image to express my feelings, using a popular meme from Internets Land.
I’ve been “reliably” informed by a buddy of mine that there is an actual process to get things a little more back to normal on ye olde Facebook News Feed. I’m in the process of trying it, so can’t verify, but thought I’d post it up anyway, because of stuff.
And that’s it. Allegedly that means you’re only left with “Recent” stuff, but we’ll see about that, won’t we?
Little cats: more cute than little chats
You see, I have just arrived home to discover the latest changes to what you think I want to see in my news feed, Facebook. As is probably implied by the fact I’ve written a blog post entitled as this is, I’m not exactly enamoured with the changes.
The core problem is basically this:
You seem to think your algorithms can deduce what news items will be of interest to me based on two factors; what news items are of interest to other friends of mine, and which people I manually tell you I want to see more from. Possibly which people I interact with on there too, with IM sessions and such.
I’m a nerd. I’m a massive nerd. I’m maybe the biggest nerd I know (depending on a few factors, but even adding this parenthesised bit strengthens my case OH GOD WHAT HAVE I DONE-).
Even I, with my love of organising shit and making things “clever” and “integrated” know that stuff like this just does not work as intended. It’s flippin’ annoying.
Does short-sighted even need a hyphen?
OR – A Mildly Clever Little Bit Of MarketingLet’s say you’re an Android app developer, you’ve written a few little things, and you want to get some traffic to them. How would you go about it?
Well, if your name’s Chris Economou you do it by creating an app with an interesting name, leave no details of what it does on its description and hope the intrigue hits home, carrying the thing on virally.
You give the thing a link to your other apps, so it serves as an advert for them, but you don’t let that detract from its main purpose. So… what is its main purpose?
Well, that would be telling. You’ll have to install it yourself, and see if it lives up to its name.
protip: it does.
Still, it’s a novel way of trying to gain attention, and I like it, which is why I’m posting this, and why you’re reading it. It’s a funny old internet!
A couple months back I lost my OS hard drive to a head crash, and had to start afresh. Choice was between good old faithful stalwart Windows XP, or new fangled Windows 7. Did I stick with the reliable trusty friend I knew so well, or take the plunge into an exciting new world of stupid see-through glass window chromes? Guess!
Naturally, this is going to be a rant, of sorts. 7 seemed fine and dandy at first but the more I tried to do more or less anything with it, the more it got in my way. Why you little!
Imagine you’re an enormous nerd, and you like to make your PC as efficient as possible to use. You have a couple dozen programs and utilities you might want quick access to, out of several more you’ll need now and again, but the Start Menu is too laborious – it’s a whole click away, man! Then there’s probable clicking through a few folders… yeesh.
As far back as Windows 98 (probably) it’s been possible to make a new toolbar, drag it off the start menu bar, slam it into the side of the screen, and set it to auto-hide when the mouse moves away. Bingo! No clicking, just move your mouse to the edge of the screen and your toolbar slides out into view, with room for a couple dozen or so shortcuts to stuff. Ace!
And they took it away. Those fucks. With no good reason. Gnnhh.
An Italian kid made a thing called Seven Desk Bar to replicate the functionality, but it’s buggy in multi-monitor setups like mine. Gnnhh.
I can only imagine this was one of the phrases uttered by one of the fuckups who rewrote Windows Explorer for 7. Sure, it’s very pretty, and “Libraries” are probably neat, whatever they are, but did they really need to break the way it scrolls? Did they really? Really actually?
Hover over the folder pane in XP, move your mouse wheel, and the folder list scrolls. Move mouse to hover the file pane, move wheel, file pane scrolls. Simple. Natural. Entirely as you’d expect; whatever’s under the cursor when you scroll the wheel, scrolls.
BUT NO. Apparently this is too complex for all the “I’m a PC” fucks out there. Now, under 7, you have to click into each pane before the scroll action will be delivered there. Might seem like a mountain out of a mole’s hill, but when you’ve been able to do something with ease for 10+ years, then suddenly have weird things scrolling when you don’t want them too, all for no reason, it rapidly grinds your gears.
Luckily this has a solution – a thing called WizMouse which will return Explorer to a sensible scrolling state. Shouldn’t have to though. Gnnhh.
Sadly WizMouse then conflicts with certain games, and needs disabling before you go into them. Gnnhh.
Again, it seems Microsoft devs must’ve gone out of their way to make Windows Explorer (which if you’re a nerd and do any file manipulation at all, you’ll spend a lot of time with) as annoying as possible, all for a few stupid bells and whistles which most people won’t even use.
Used to be, you could sort the files in a folder by modification date, and as soon as you open the folder they’re there, all sorted by date, instantly. Not so under 7! Now if you sort a folder by date, so the most recent ones are at the top for example, it’ll re-sort them every single time you open the folder meaning wasted seconds all over the place. Nice one, Windows 7! That’s progress.
Fortunately this too is fixable by right clicking the folder and telling it to “optimise” for “documents”, although what the fuck ever else they’re presuming to “optimise” for by default which needs a fresh fucking scan every single time you open it I have no idea. Gnnhh.
Really don’t know what that’s about. Very annoying.
Actually it’s not I don’t really care about that but while I’m here, I might as well write it.
For the most part it’s ok. Firefox hangs for no reason whatsoever every time I get back to the PC after power saving’s kicked in, and if I “sleep”or “hibernate” the thing then flash player breaks… but maybe that’s FF and not 7. Hrm…
RANT END
P.S. This was mostly so I have a note about how to fix those Windows Explorer things. I don’t really think you care about what I think of Windows 7, guy. Haha!